Against Positive Thinking, Again

Well, February almost over.  I had ideas to blog about today between about 10 and 11, now mostly gone.

Danger everywhere was one of them.  I am now doing mask and gloves when I scrape the litterbox, worry about touching own face or food after touching the little cat, which I do a lot.  It seems astonishing to say this animal is worth the risk to me.  But a facebook friend, Rusty, writes that his mother died of a virus you catch from a litterbox.  I recall New Year’s Eve saying, I don’t even want to live feeling like this, then going to Cat Welfare.  I so much mourned Sheba, the loss of an animal in the house.  Many tx patients feel like this, and do have pets.

I am discouraged with yet another UTI bad enough to require hospitalization, and a dangerous IV in my arm leading to my heart.  Taking a shower is a big risk, means wrapping arm very carefully in plastic wrap and silk tape.  It never stops, and it’s all making me feel hopeless, like why do I bother?  start looking - there is danger everywhere, everywhere.  A wooden-handled knife, are bacteria hiding in that wood?  Leftover cooked chicken in the frig could have listeria, you can get a horrible stomach infection.  No church food of course, no potlucks or buffets, you are taking your life in your hands to eat chili from Wendy’s which is at least governed by some sanitation laws.

A friend shares my discouragement - I do so many things to be healthy, she says, and she does, yet this.  Add to this in my case a badly damaged relationship with my tx surgeon, contradictory orders, and worst of all, his nurse (I assume he ordered her) throwing a tantrum at me because my PCP put me in the hospital where he has privileges.  She was probably just repeating the tantrum he threw at her.  I am waiting to hear about being assigned to someone else.  Yet, as Tom comments, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.  Yes, you are stepping into unfamiliarity.  I have low expectations now.  By and large, doctors I have met over the years in teaching hospitals are unbearably arrogant, given to telling you what they are going to do without explanation of the options, and to hell with the common knowledge that patients do best when they feel in charge of their care. 

Cellphone alarm.  Now what?  Time for noon pills.  Rapamune.  Siroliumus, that is.  One after another these meds make me feel sick.  Nose bleed, upset stomach, headache, just plain disgusted with the medical profession.  It’s one thing to be sick and old and die, another thing when someone has promised you a new life and you get one infection after another (because of the immunosuppressants) and never a week off to feel good.

And this moodiness caused by who knows what - big weather keeps coming thru, I have fibromyalgia, which can cause depression among many other things.  Not helped by the conflict with Dr. God touching on my ancient beginningless issues around an abusive father not acting like a father should.  Well, of course, your ideas and expectations get you in trouble.

Good mood, bad mood - who the hell am I?  One day I love this new book of poetry I got by Tony Hoagland.  The next day it is boring.  I am bored by pretty much everything.  Okay, opportunity for a major Buddhist insight: Wun is constantly changing, influenced by everything, many of those things invisible to our stupid blinkered western eyes.  Hang on, this too will pass.

And you feel what you feel.  I've been arguing on facebook against "positive thinking," which is a synonym for what?  Optimism, which is often unfounded.  You hope, you get disappointed.  Just experience without judgment.  I told my friend Bob Parks, "Positive thinking is against my religion."  He is a minister widely read in various religions, and told me how he gently encourages people who are very ill to be with their experience.  He knew exactly what I was talking about.  So often that's all you need to comfort you a little, which is all anyone can do.

Making a difference in this world

We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
Mother Teresa.

Thinking this morning about doing things that matter - this Rothschild guy setting out huge projects to rouse awareness of global warming and trash - clearly he wants to matter, to change the world significantly. The New Yorker profile of him details the latest project, to sail around the world on a boat made of plastic bottles.

Most nights we watch NBC news, a sort of old-way kind of thing our parents did, like sitting on the front porch. The news often ends with a segment called "Making a Difference." These little video essays spotlight some formerly ordinary person, sometimes a child, who has conceived of a generous project, and drawn other people in. That's the key. It becomes more than one person, it's big. A system.

I have groused about these enough to Tom, so I'll keep it short here. The assumption of this series (and of Rothschild's projects) is that our gestures matter only if we do something big and visible. These stories never spotlight individuals like my old friend Marie, who appeared at the door after my mother died with a bunch of sunflowers. Marie was like that, dropping off soup. I got to think of what she did as her Bodhissatva work, though I feel sure she didn't think of it that way. She was just led by her sympathy, her desire to offer.

The importance of small actions is so evident when the action is mean - look how quickly a dog or cat learns to cringe or bite or flee, and it is very difficult to untrain them from their fear and their reaction. Maybe we are all that way. I know children are. I remember the single most important thing my father ever said to me.

I was in seventh grade and not adjusting well to the new freedom of changing classes and the new idea of junior high, a pen of adolescents, grades seven through nine, instead of the traditional K-8 grade school I had grown up in, where I'd been looking forward to being one of the big kids. Seventh grade was small kids here.

And now there was homework, on top of it. I didn't like to do it, I suppose. It seemed (and was) meaningless. More of the very boring. My public school education was like that all the way through, tired old teachers stuffing irrelevant facts in your head, you obediently wrote the fact down, Battle of Hastings, 1066, as meaningless as if it were Sanskrit.

Actually, I wish it had been. Then I'd have something to show for those years. How strange that kind of education seems now that we have the internet, the great cloud of facts, any fact you want right at your fingertips, so that it is slowly becoming obvious that mental skills like analyzing the reliability of a source are most needed.

Back to junior high. I had been getting some low grades and 5's in "citizenship," which really meant disobedience, esp passing notes and talking to others, as I recall. But now I had found religion - that's another story - and changed my ways. I was pretty much behaving perfectly, as I understood it.

I waited for my father to come home and sit down at the breakfast table. I must have waited eagerly, anxiously. This was supremely important to me. I believed he would love me now. I thought the love I got was all about how "good" (?) I was, about whether or not I deserved it. I thought I could earn love. I had a Bible that said "As you sow, so will you reap." I understood that in a very simple way, expecting fairly instant results.

I put the report card in front of him, a beautiful clean grid of A's and 1's.

"Straight A's," I said proudly.

He glanced at it and made a dismissive sound like "Harumph." Then he said, "Why aren't they A pluses?" I can still hear the timbre of his voice, can feel that scene almost sixty years ago.

I fell from delighted anticipation to shocked disappointment. My father was hypersensitive to facial expressions, and must have noticed mine. Quickly he said in his rare more human voice, "Oh, I probably shouldn't have said that." Alcoholics do that, express regret. I understand they do it after they beat up their wives.

But he had said it. The moment had occurred, I had taken it in. Nothing could erase it - it was a fact.

It was a long time until I remembered that event, but it left big footprints in my life from then on. I had been trained. I believed that nothing I did would ever be enough (and my father's behavior toward me kept confirming that, the apology forgotten). I don't think I have to tell you how that played out in my life, and not just in the next report cards, not just in how I felt about trying in school. In life.

So many years, decades, later, I realize my father didn't really have volition. He just passed down the cruelty and indifference of his own father. His fire temperament, his DNA if you like, predisposed him to love alcohol, which quickly loosens the tongue. His experience in the trenches of the last great world war left him with the extreme reactivity of post-traumatic stress. What was inflicted on me was a general cruelty of the world you could say. The suffering he had experienced was funneled down to me, and to my brother and sister in different patterns. And this is always true. We are dots in a cultural context. We are the sum of all our experiences. If we don't seriously work on ourselves, we will pass on the the distorted gifts we were given.
It was a really awful moment for me, the time I heard myself hector my little girl in my father's voice, catching yourself in a passing mirror. Slowly you learn to do the only thing you can do, watch yourself and your reactivity, those conditioned things you say. Listen to what comes out of your own mouth. Hesitate. Think of the other's reality, think how you can be kind.

Grand gestures, fabulous stage shows, oh, maybe they influence the world. But when I look at my own life, the great events of my time did not matter nearly so much as that one moment when I presented my report card for my father's approval. He is long dead now, but how he lives on.